Assassination Vacation Read online

  Richard Mudd, who died in 2002 at the age of 101, was one of the greatest PR men of the twentieth century, doggedly lobbying to clear his grandfather’s name. Two presidents who didn’t agree on much concurred on Mudd. Though Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan concluded that the full presidential pardon Mudd received from Andrew Johnson in 1869 (for his heroic doctoring during a yellow fever outbreak at the prison) trumped all further presidential action, both Carter and Reagan wrote open letters to Richard Mudd expressing their faith in Dr. Mudd’s innocence in the conspiracy. Carter wrote to Richard Mudd that he hoped to “restore dignity to your grandfather’s name and clear the Mudd family name of any negative connotation or implied lack of honor,” which Richard Mudd’s distant cousin, journalist Roger Mudd, read on the evening news. Reagan wrote, “I came to believe as you do that Dr. Samuel Mudd was indeed innocent of any wrongdoing.”

  So there are two factions — those who believe Mudd was innocent and punished for simply doing his job, and those who believe Mudd was in bed with Booth from the get-go. I believe Mudd was guilty of conspiring with Booth in the original plot to kidnap Lincoln. And for history buffs leaning toward Mudd’s guilt, or any fan of what I like to call the Emphasis Added School of History, Edward Steers’s book His Name Is Still Mudd: The Case Against Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd is both useful and appealing.

  Steers recounts that Booth and Mudd were seen in public together on two occasions prior to the assassination, damning evidence the prosecution used to convict Mudd in 1865. Steers also brings up relatively new evidence, not unearthed from an archive until 1975, that Booth’s co-conspirator George Atzerodt confessed that before the assassination, Booth had sent supplies ahead to Mudd’s home. Moreover, the author persuasively argues that Mudd acted as Booth’s “recruiter,” introducing him to Confederate Secret Service agents, including John Surratt. Steers asserts that the historical record is silent on whether or not Mudd was in on the assassination, but he does point out that Mudd probably knew that his involvement in the original kidnapping plot was damning enough, and that if the doctor turned over the assassin to the authorities, the assassin would have implicated the doctor for sure. As Steers puts it, “To give up Booth, Booth would have surely given up Mudd.” Which is why, when the authorities questioned Mudd, Mudd played dumb, claiming that he didn’t recognize Booth because Booth was wearing a fake beard at the time — lame.

  Steers’s title alludes to the cliché “his name is mud,” erroneously believed to derive from the shame the Lincoln assassination brought to the Mudd family name. But it was simply a coincidence, the derogatory slang “mud” having been in usage for well over a hundred years at the time of the assassination, especially applying to British members of Parliament who had besmirched their family names by losing elections and such. This quirk of freak linguistic happen-stance damned the Mudd family to a level of shame unknown to, say, subsequent generations of Family Atzerodt. Meeker folks might have laid low, counting on Americans’ amnesia with regards to all things historical to eventually wash away the sins of the father. The Mudds, on the other hand, turned restoring the doctor’s good standing into a cottage industry, turning the Mudd farm into a tourist attraction.

  Finally, Klam and I find the house, squeaking inside for the last tour of the day. There’s another tour guide in period costume. There’s another antique store’s worth of furniture, some of it, impressively, built by Mudd. This tour is enthralling, partly because the guide is so matter-of-fact. She waves at the bed upstairs, announcing it’s the bed where Booth took a nap. In the living room, she nods at the sofa, saying that’s where Mudd examined Booth’s mangled leg. She’s more excited about the piano in the corner, and her excitement is shared. A dark-haired mustachioed man, who bears a slight resemblance to Booth, if Booth wore Bermuda shorts, asks if he can play a song. I’m stunned when the guide lets him in through the velvet rope and the rest of us, including his of course appalled teenage daughter, stand there listening to him bang out a choppy but vaguely familiar tune. After he finishes his song, I ask him, “Sir, were you just playing ‘Lean on Me’?”

  “That’s right!” he answers, thrilled.

  Now, whenever I think of Mudd and his house I hear that song, hear Mudd serenading the limping Booth, taking his arm and helping him up the stairs, singing, “Lean on me, when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend.”

  The Mudd family lived in this house until they sold it to the Maryland Historic Trust in the 1970s. The guide claims there are Mudds everywhere here in Charles County. Many of them help out around the museum. The woman working at the cash register in the gift shop says she’s Dr. Mudd’s great-great-granddaughter. She’s very nice.

  The Mudd family project, to redeem the reputation of a relative who’s been dead for more than a century, is not without charm. This faith, this love, is understandable, even likable. Actually, I envy the Mudds their faith. This question of questionable ancestors — I’ve pondered it a lot.

  Like my cashier at the Mudd house, I have an historical great-great-grandfather too. And I thought of her great-great-grandfather when I happened to read about the following principle of physics, but mostly I thought about mine. The physics concept is called the “grandfather paradox.”

  The grandfather paradox poses this riddle: What if a person traveled back in time, encountered her grandfather, got into an argument with the grandfather, and then shot her grandfather to death, thereby ensuring that the granddaughter herself would never be born?

  What I like about the grandfather paradox is that it treats time travel not as some lofty exercise in cultural tourism — looking over Melville’s shoulder as he wrote Moby-Dick — but as a petty excuse to bicker with and gun down one’s own relatives.

  I just so happen to have a grandfather who deserved it, my great-great-grandfather, John Vowell. The reason why I would set the wayback machine for the sole purpose of rubbing him out is this:

  In the 1860s, the teenage John Vowell joined up with pro-slavery guerrilla warrior William Clarke Quantrill, who has been called the “most hated man in the Civil War,” which is saying something. On August 21, 1863, Quantrill led his gang, including my great-great-gramps, into Lawrence, Kansas, reportedly ordering them to “kill every male and burn every house.” By the end of the day, at least 182 men and boys were dead.

  Edward Fitch was shot in his own living room. His widow wrote this letter about witnessing his death: “My dear father and mother, I have been trying to summon strength to write to all the particulars of this sad, sad day…which has wrecked all my happiness. Never before did I feel the meaning of the word crushed.”

  Lawrence was a symbolic target for Quantrill and his men. Since before the Civil War, Lawrence had been the capital of abolitionism in the West. The town had been founded by Free-Soil New Englanders who settled in Kansas to vote to outlaw slavery in the new state. Lawrence had already been sacked once before by a pro-slavery mob in 1856, and in retaliation, the famed abolitionists John Brown and sons attacked a pro-slavery settlement, slaughtering five men as their families looked on. This spawned a grubby little guerrilla war between abolitionist Jayhawkers and the pro-slavery border ruffians of Missouri. Hundreds were killed on both sides in what became known as “Bleeding Kansas,” years before the official kickoff of Fort Sumter.

  If I were to travel back in time and confront my great-great-grandfather the terrorist, what would we have to say to each other? Remember that in the grandfather paradox, before I kill him, we get into an argument first. Would he defend his motives, tell me some chilling story about the Jayhawker who ruined his life, perhaps enumerate Quantrill’s overlooked good qualities? And how might I rebut? Recite “I have a dream”? Sing a few bars of “The KKK Took My Baby Away”? Or maybe I could tell him about the morning in September idealistic young men not unlike himself flew into the city where I live and taught me the meaning of the word crushed.

  After my great-great-grandfather and I have it out, let’s suppose that aga
inst all odds, a gun-toting bushwhacking guerrilla warrior could be overpowered by me, a former art history major. And what am I killing him for? Taking the law into his own hands, murdering people as a political act. This is where my grandfather paradox turns into the grandfather paradox paradox: to prevent my great - great - grandfather from doing wrong, I myself become a vigilante taking justice into my own hands, shooting somebody because I disagree with him. Which is, of course, wrong and exactly what he did.

  Curiously, if my great - great - grandfather’s friend Quantrill had gotten his way, my cashier, the great-great-granddaughter of Mudd, would not be spending her Saturday selling souvenir coasters depicting the room where Mudd doctored Booth. Legend has it Quantrill rode east in 1865, intending to assassinate President Lincoln. Quantrill was in Kentucky when he heard about Booth. Quantrill got drunk toasting Booth.

  Thus do I, descendant of racist, pro-slavery teenage terrorist, buy a copy of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd Family Home Cooking from her, descendant of racist, slave-owning, convicted assassination accomplice. It’s a cookbook that contains recipes submitted by various Mudd granddaughters and cousins for dishes such as cherry nut bars and three-fruit marmalade.

  As Klam drives to the church in Bryantown where Mudd is buried, I page through the cookbook. It says, “Life in the good old days here was centered around the family, hard work, good food and fun games on the plantations and farms.” Good old days for everyone but the family slaves.

  In His Name Is Still Mudd, one of Edward Steers’s most powerful, resonant arguments is one that amounts to a tangent. In a curmudgeonly chapter titled “The Good Doctor,” Steers turns his attention to Mudd’s Hippocratic oath alibi. After enumerating the number of slaves owned by Mudd (eleven), Steers cites the testimony of one of Mudd’s former slaves at his conspiracy trial. The slave testified that once, when he was pokey about following Mudd’s orders, Mudd shot him, hoping to teach him a lesson about picking up his pace. Then Steers points out that some of the other slaves testified that they were often whipped by Mudd. “By any standard,” hisses Steers, “owning slaves and whipping and shooting them seems at variance with the ideals of the Hippocratic oath.”

  The Dr. Samuel A. Mudd Family Home Cooking cookbook says, “In the correspondence with Dr. Mudd while he was imprisoned [at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas] was mention of the stuffed ham at Easter, the ‘gobbler’ at Christmas and several references to the Christmas egg nog.”

  So I booked a ticket for Key West and went to the place where Mudd ate rancid meat if he ate at all, all the while thinking of Christmas turkey, dreaming of Easter ham.

  I cannot decide whom I resent more, Dr. Mudd or Jimmy Buffett, as I vomit into a paper bag on a boat in the Florida Straits. But as “Margaritaville” thumps on the boat’s loudspeaker I am momentarily more famous than the Lincoln assassination conspirator and that laid-back singer-songwriter combined. On today’s voyage of the Yankee Clipper II I am a celebrity of seasickness, famous on board as the first person to throw up, and then as the person who has thrown up the most. I am famous as the tourist the crew shooed out to the aft railing for “fresh air” and who, after the wind almost blew me overboard, grudgingly chose wanting to die over actually dying, thus ripping open the cabin door in tears screaming, “I don’t like it out there!” I am famous for wedging myself, knuckles white and eyes closed, between the snack bar and the door for an hour and a half, trying to drown out the sound of Jimmy Buffett’s voice by softly singing the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B,” so that passengers squeezing past me to get to the overhyped fresh air could hear the faint, repeated melody of that song: This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.

  There are only two ways to get from Key West to Fort Jefferson at Dry Tortugas National Park, where Dr. Samuel Mudd and three others convicted for aiding John Wilkes Booth were imprisoned in the 1860s — by boat or seaplane. Except for today: the seaplane pilot, the wise, sane seaplane pilot, canceled my morning flight to the park because of the hazardous wind. Thus am I bobbing up and down here on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle opening up my third paper barf bag to catch what’s left of the key lime yogurt I had for breakfast.

  It is late autumn here in the Florida Keys, islands where, Hemingway wrote after the 1935 hurricane, “there is no autumn but only a more dangerous summer.” (Yesterday, I made the mistake of visiting Hemingway’s house in Key West. It was crawling with cats and I’m allergic. So, unable to dodge the sixty-something descendants of Hemingway’s six-toed pet, I eyeballed the room where he wrote Green Hills of Africa and For Whom the Bell Tolls for approximately eight seconds before sneezing back to my hotel room for eye drops and antihistamine.)

  After nearly three hours of what the Yankee Clipper II’s crew call “cowboying” up and down the bucking waves, Fort Jefferson pops into view. It is an impressive, six-sided brick stronghold built to scare off invaders. I have read Dr. Mudd’s letters home describing it as a “godforsaken isle,” a “place of woe.” I know that a reporter who caught up with Mudd back home in Maryland after his release remarked that in Mudd’s “sunken, lusterless eyes, pallid lips and cold, ashy complexion, one can read the words ‘Dry Tortugas’ with a terrible significance.” And yet, right now, for the simple blessed fact that it is not a boat, Fort Jefferson looks as bright and fluffy as a hexagonal lemon meringue pie.

  Facts about Dry Tortugas National Park: seventy miles west of Key West; the cluster of islands was discovered by Ponce de Leon in 1513; named the Tortugas, the Spanish word for sea turtles (the adjective “dry” was tacked on later to alert sailors they would drink no fresh water here); Fort Jefferson, named after Thomas Jefferson, was established to protect the shipping lanes to the Gulf of Mexico; it was constructed between 1846 and 1874, when it was abandoned by the United States Army; the fort was never finished, though it was reoccupied by the navy in 1898 thanks to the Spanish-American War; it’s ninety miles north of Cuba; in 1861, it became a federal prison; in 1865, the four conspirators convicted of plotting Lincoln’s murder who were not hung in Washington were exiled here; three of them — Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, Samuel Arnold, and Ned Spangler — would receive presidential pardons on the last day of Andrew Johnson’s administration; the fourth, Michael O’Laughlin, died here during the yellow fever epidemic of 1867; in its heyday, around two thousand people lived here, including a few women and children — mostly officers’ families, not to mention the odd laundress (because as punishment imprisoned men were hung up by their thumbs, but apparently a girl job like washing socks was considered cruel and unusual and left to the female hired help); the fort consists of sixteen million bricks shipped at great cost from as far away as Maine; designated by President Franklin Roosevelt a national monument in 1935, the Dry Tortugas became a national park in 1992, offering historical tours, bird-watching, shark research, and snorkeling around its reefs. Also, though this is an island, there is a moat.

  Mike Ryan, the interpretative ranger at Dry Tortugas National Park, is waiting on the boat dock. I must look about as healthy as I feel. “Fighting six- to eight-foot seas isn’t always that much fun,” he sympathizes, leading me across the moat and into the fort for my guided tour.

  “This was not an ordinary fort,” Mike begins. “It was extraordinarily large.”

  Inside the brick perimeter is a vast grassy courtyard dotted with palms. There are brick sidewalks and benches shaded by gnarled trees. It’s breezy, but peaceful. It is so pleasant I can almost imagine taking a vacation here without the extra tourist glamour of presidential killers and mosquito-borne disease. In fact, most of my fellow passengers are presently pulling on snorkel gear or lining up for the picnic; they will return to the boat hours later with sun-chapped smiles, having gone all day without mentioning yellow fever.

  Mike says, “I think it’s a paradox that this prison-in-paradise theme’s kind of interwoven through. The contrast makes it so compelling.”

  Guiding me through a brick arcade, Mike stands next to a cannon and points down a corrid
or. “Some of the views that you’ll see today you can’t enjoy anywhere else because of these long, unobstructed views looking down wings of archways.” He says that the arch motif is repeated a couple of thousand times. The loopy curves soften an otherwise oppressive slab.

  “It’s pretty funny. They’re building arches inside other arches,” Mike says of the fort’s engineers. “They’re kind of showing off if you think about it. In fact, there are many arches you can’t see because they’re in our foundations.” The two thousand arches, not to mention the moat, endow Fort Jefferson with a medieval mood, more William the Conqueror than U. S. Grant.

  “The concept is not that different from a castle,” Mike agrees. “It shows you how fairly static the technology was. We’re still using a castle to protect ourselves. It shows you how unprepared they were for rapid technological changes.”

  He is referring to the fact that, by the beginning of the Civil War, Fort Jefferson was technologically obsolete. The U.S. government had been shipping brick out here for a couple of decades, trying to build an impregnable fortress with forty-five-foot-high walls that were eight feet thick, until, suddenly, there were steam-powered warships that were no longer at the mercy of wind and were capable of firing rifled artillery that could blow holes straight through the walls.

  The War of 1812 witnessed such national security embarrassments as the British burning down the White House, so in the years following, the United States started building coastal forts like this one. Mike declares, “They not only helped prevent war, but they were powerful symbols that we wanted to be left alone. And they fit in very well with the American philosophy at the time. You know, it’s only since 1898 that we’ve become a world power. Prior to 1898, we were very insulated. What better way of insulating ourselves than to build this thick skin?”